Your Weekly Callahan

Part 4: "He bled through the pen"

It would be a genuinely dark shame if future bipeds, particularly those who visit Portland, were to lose the memory of John Callahan, the talented and tortured cartoonist, musician and author, whose art emerged from a corpse, as he called it, that sat under his head.

In an effort to see that this doesn't happen, a number of friends and members of his family are raising money to build a memorial to Callahan. Land has been donated by Legacy Good Samaritan Hospital near his haunts in NW Portland at 21st and NW Marshall; also, a $100,000 matching grant was donated anonymously (toward the estimated $225,000 cost).

In the spirit of the effort to remember John, we've been running short clips of the film "Touch Me Someplace I Can Feel," made by Simone De Vries. The movie was released three years before his death in 2010.